Documentation

As someone who works in the IT field, I spend a lot of my time looking at documentation. By documentation I mean a wide range of products: user manuals, online KB (knowledge base), FAQ’s, and forums.

At work we use a product called Symantec Ghost. What this does is (more or less) take a picture of a computer, and then copy that picture onto another computer. It’s a way to backup EVERYTHING on a computer so that if it crashes it can be restored quickly. When making the image (what the picture is called) I have the option to compress it (to save space). While usually I don’t (it slows down the process) I started doing it recently (to save space). Well, today I went to push the image onto a machine and received a scary looking error. After doing some research I landed on a symantec documentation page. While I’ll put a link at the end, here is what it said, in short:

“If you are using compression to make your images, don’t.”

What? How did anyone at Symantec think that was OK? That isn’t a solution. It’s as if you discovered one day that you couldn’t change the volume on your TV, and when you looked in the manual it said “If you’re trying to change the volume, stop.”